David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Basically, you're going to pay for two different operating systems, even though you're only putting one on if you ever load a different operating system on. Yes, it very strongly incentivizes you to never ever ever ship any other operating systems on your computers as a company. This is of course the way that regulators would look at it in 1994. That would get Microsoft in some hot water, and they had to agree to stop doing this practice. The way Microsoft would look at it is, we're just helping our customers. Do you really think that these companies want to keep a whole separate ledger of what machines they shipped DOS on or Windows on versus what machines they shipped period? Wouldn't it just be easier if once a month or once a quarter, they could just report to us their total shipments like they have to report to their investors anyway, and then we'll just send them an invoice for all their machines? Totally. While antitrust and the government would seize onto this as a smoking gun, I think the reality is this was irrelevant in terms of the forces that made DOS and Windows the winners. They were already the winners by the time they started doing this. If this had happened earlier, you could see how this would be more of a compelling way to get market share. But by the time they started doing it, they were already running away with the market.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.